How Do You Want Your Children to Remember You? (with Michael Keller)

I want to tell a story about how I learned something that changed my life. It was the first Keller Center retreat in 2023. Our inaugural fellows, a couple dozen of them, didn’t know each other well. We had just finished a team-building scavenger hunt crisscrossing Manhattan. We settled into a Sunday school room at Redeemer West Side on W 83rd Street. We were about to do a Zoom call with Tim from his hospital room. It was the last time many of us spoke with him. He would die within weeks. He left us notes on what he wanted to see from the center.In that exercise before we talked to Tim, I led a discussion on the Great Dechurching, the unprecedented decline in Christian practice in the United States since the year 2000. I’ve led this exercise many times before and since, without incident. The goal is to identify what events and trends really shift culture. In this case, a majority of Americans had the internet in their homes by 2000. Add smartphones and social media and now AI and you can see that the dawn of the information age is perhaps the biggest story of the 21st century so far.But the exercise didn’t sit well with many of our fellows. We weren’t yet comfortable with each other. Some wanted to dig a lot deeper with ideas and a lot further back in history. Others saw the internet more as a vehicle rather than the driver of cultural change. Some just misunderstood the exercise altogether.I’ll never forget Michael Keller’s response. He pulled some of his dad’s notes on how to share the gospel in our current age. He described various overlapping and conflicting cultural narratives that help us make sense of the world, apart from God. And then he showed how Jesus critiques and ultimately completes those narratives. It was brilliant work.The whole center rallied around this idea. We recorded and wrote the group study Making Sense of Us: Exploring Six Stories that Shape How We Live. Michael Keller wrote the foreword. And we rallied behind a new book, The Stories We Live By: Seven Cultural Myths That Fail Us and the Story That Never Will, published by Zondervan. It’s written by Michael and his father, Tim, based on those notes we saw in 2023. Ever since that day I’ve adapted what I learned into my own teaching, not just about cultural narratives, but about how we think about the various deep levels of cultural change. And I’m eager to talk now about this book with Michael on Gospelbound. We’ll also discuss another new book Michael recently wrote, Talking to Kids About Hard Things: Honest Conversations When Life Gets Complicated. He wrote that book with Rebekah Hannah and published it with New Growth Press. In This Episode:00:00 – Why the best gospel presentation cannot save your children00:58 – How an early Keller Center retreat shaped The Stories We Live By05:02 – How Michael and Tim Keller began the book together07:11 – The seven cultural stories shaping modern life09:37 – Why identity may be the defining cultural narrative of our age11:10 – Cultural narratives as Christian heresies13:52 – The strengths and failures of expressive individualism15:58 – What Michael hopes The Stories We Live By changes in the church18:15 – How cultural narratives shape Christians too20:27 – What remains in Tim Keller’s unpublished notes23:06 – How Michael handles ongoing criticism of his father25:35 – Tim Keller, “third way” criticism, and diagonalization26:50 – What church planting taught Michael that he could not learn secondhand29:56 – Redeemer’s transition after Tim Keller30:49 – Why the best way to honor Tim Keller is not to imitate him32:28 – Introducing Talking to Kids About Hard Things35:09 – Why Michael was skeptical of parenting books36:36 – “Your kids need your repentance more than your perfection”38:25 – Why apologizing to your children matters40:14 – The gospel in action through forgiveness and repentance41:40 – Why technique cannot produce saving faith44:01 – How to help children feel safe asking hard questions45:17 – Teaching like Jesus by asking questions47